New 3D Tattoo Design Blog 2011

Death could come at any time, Angelina Jolie says. The tattoo is a strong reminder to live fully in the moment and never have regrets. (About her first tattoo of the Japanese Kanji for Death) I didn't get the tattoo for the dark reason everyone thinks.

Usually all my tattoos came at good times. A tattoo is something permanent when you've made a self-discovery, or something you've come to a conclusion about. - Angelina Jolie - 2003

Tattoos aren't meant for everybody and they're too goddamn good for some people.
~Lyle Tuttle, tattoo artist, author, and lecturer.

I dropped my pants in a tattoo parlor in Amsterdam. I woke up in a waterbed with this funky-looking dragon with a blue tongue on my hip. I realized I made a mistake, so a few months later I got a cross to cover it. When my pants hang low, it looks like I'm wearing a dagger!
~Angelina Jolie

Primitive tribes were certainly convinced that the spirit, having escaped from the body at death, retained a replica of its earthly tenement. They therefore used tattoo marks as a means of identification in the next world and a passport to future happiness. (Ronald Scutt, Art, Sex and Symbol, 1974, p. 63)

"I wanted some decoration. See, the one on my wrist is for everybody; the one on my tit is for me and my friends. Just a little treat for the boys, like icing on the cake." - Janis Joplin

The tattoo attracts and also repels precisely because it is different.
~Margo DeMello

I always look for a woman who has a tattoo. I see a woman with a tattoo, and I'm thinking, okay, here's a gal who's capable of making a decision she'll regret in the future.
~Richard Jeni

"But to become a freak one needs a strong character and unusual determination."
George Burchett - Memoirs of a Tattooist, 1956

Traditionally, body art has served to attract the opposite sex, boost self-esteem, ward off or invoke spirits, indicate social position or marital status, identify with a particular age or gender group or mark a rite of passage, such as puberty or marriage. It's this sort of strictly prescribed, highly ritualistic decoration that Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher depict in their book, African Ceremonies. "We've tried to show how body art is relevant to every stage of development, from birth to death," says Angela Fisher.

Today, people with tattoos, body piercings, and brands are everywhere. They are shown in advertisements, on television shows, and in magazine and newspaper photographs. Even a glamorous toy icon, Barbie, comes with temporary tattoos.
~KATHLYN GAY, Body Marks

"It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin."
- Herman Melville -- Moby-Dick

Everybody wants to see the pictures, and yet nobody wants to see them.
Ray Bradbury -- The Illustrated Man

Sonny and another Hells Angel who was at the meeting thought they were beyond a little patch so they headed down to a local tattoo shop in Oakland and were the first to get the famous One Percent tattoos.
~Chuck Zito

Sometimes I bust out and do things so permanent. Like tattoos and marriage.
~Drew Barrymore

"There is no perfect beauty that hath not strangeness in the proportion."
Sir Francis Bacon - London, 1639

"I'll tell you this, lad: A tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back." - Sarah Hall -- The Electric Michelangelo

A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.
~V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Modern Primitives

Tattoo on the lower back? Might as well be a bullseye.
~Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughn)

Anthropometamorphosis, Man Transformed or, the Artificial Changeling, Historically Presented, a Puritan diatribe published in 1653, railed against disfigurement of the body in pursuit of "ridiculous beauty," "filthy fineness" and "loathsome loveliness." John Bulwer

"In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves." H.G. Wells

It will be an honour to represent my country and get all the kit, stay in the Olympic village, and, when I'm old enough, get a tattoo with the Olympic rings. ~Tom Daley

My tattoo is a phoenix. I got the first when I was 16. I hid it for years.
~Ashley Scott